2022 Weaver-Tremblay Award - Jasmin Habib, University of Waterloo

Jasmin Habib holds a PhD in Anthropology and an MA in International Peace Studies. Her research publications focus on the politics of empire and the practices of decolonization with primary interest in the experiences of war-affected refugees and diasporas in Israel, Palestine, Canada, and the United States; indigenous practices and relations of autonomy in North America; and the architecture of consent for contemporary state violence (systemic and direct).

Jasmin Habib has created a unique assemblage of multi-faceted ethnographies that engage forms of activism, resistance, and relations among communities embedded in complex conflicts. She has analysed nation-state policies of violence, dispossession, and denied futures, while highlighting expressions of relations that are remembered, memorialised, and renewed where possible, relations which often enact denied possibilities. Her most extensive work as been with Palestinian and Jewish diasporas and activists, in Canada, the U.S. and Israel/Palestine.

Jasmin Habib’s research and activism focuses on community experiences and practices that shape Jewish diaspora, Israeli and Palestinian identities. She has carefully documented not only how Jewish diaspora relationships to Israel are enacted to embody place and belonging but how Palestinians’ continued relationships to the land – physically and materially real as well as actively imagined through life histories and poetic and artistic expression -- re-create the possibilities for co-inhabiting the very sites of their displacement.

Jasmin Habib’s work explores Jewish political engagement in Israel, Canada and the United States, focusing on dissidents’ experiences in diverse peace, human rights and social justice campaigns. She draws attention to activists’ connections to multiple sites of engagement and belonging, and the practices that expose the limitations on what is deemed politically possible or “realistic.”

Her work extends the existing literature on ethnographies, diasporas, dispossession, and activism and has broad applied implications, not only for Palestine/Israel, but across Canada and the U.S.

We would also like to express our gratitude to Dr. Habib for her long-term support of CASCA and highlight the contributions she has made to our journal Anthropologica. Dr. Habib sat on Anthropologica’s Board of Directors under Andrew Lyons and Naomi MacPherson’s editorships before becoming the Editor in Chief and Anglophone Editor of the journal from 2015 to 2018.